Autopiloting: How to get other things done

Sometimes, you don’t need to quit things to focus – you just need to push it all to the side and let go. Enter autopiloting.

For most activities in life, you can get 80% of the results on about 20% of the effort. It’s not the optimal setup, and it won’t always keep you moving forward. But in general, you can extend a pretty long burn rate on 20% effort.

That’s what autopiloting is all about. You don’t have to quit all your other projects, all your social get-togethers, and all your other stuff. You can just put them on autopilot.

The thing about autopiloting is that you have to get comfortable letting things go. You can’t be a perfectionist.

It’s okay to stop making progress in certain areas.

It’s okay to let other obligations atrophy.

It’s okay to quite paying full attention.

That’s tough sometimes, scary even, especially in areas where you’ve devoted a lot of attention in the past. The benefit, though, is that you can create space for other things, space to get other things done, space to focus elsewhere.

Someone once said that anything worth doing is worth doing well, and we basically accepted it as the gospel truth. Truth is, anything worth doing is just worth doing. Don’t pretend you have to do it all well.